by Nick Ryder
Chapter Twenty-Five
“What was that for?” Cara demanded as soon as the trap had worked. She looked around at the girls, none of whom looked surprised by what had just happened. “Why did you kidnap her?”
“It’s none of your business,” Lisa said coolly.
“Like hell it’s not my business. What are you going to do with her?”
“You have your motives and I have mine,” I said. “This is mine. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
Cara looked up at the camera with a stormy face, her grip so tight on her halberd that her knuckles were white. The other members of her village looked concerned.
Eventually Cara had to settle down though. There was nothing she could do to make me tell her, and it had no direct impact on the invasion. It was something she had to just accept.
I struggled to keep the excitement out of my voice so it didn’t sound like I was gloating. I hadn’t managed to do anything as efficient as that capture before. It was a good sign for the rest of the maze, and the rest of the traps.
The rest of the maze passed in a similar fashion, with me triggering traps when people weren’t expecting it and killing half a dozen of the invading force in this room alone. The poisonous spiders were easy to kill when you pinned them down, but so lethal that just the grazing of a fang against bare skin would kill the victim, horrifically, in moments. Many still landed on fur that completely countered their attack, but a few got bites in, and considering what a small amount of nutrigel the tiny creatures took to gestate, I found them highly efficient.
Mart was thrown when he hit the first dead end and had to cede control of leading the column to the woman who happened to be in the position to head down a different route. That led to trouble, with me triggering traps at the head of the column and getting people killed to undermine Mart’s confidence in the rest of their abilities.
By the time everyone had gotten through the maze and piled into the next room, a whole ten people had died, and morale looked down.
Cara hadn’t relaxed at all, but my girls looked jubilant.
The next room was the Indiana Jones room and people entered it with furs above their head, knowing that the ceiling panels were going to fall out.
That part hadn’t changed, but I’d been working on an invention that would play on the expectations of the tribe as to what they were expecting.
When as many people as could fit were in the room, I triggered the trap. The ceiling panels clattered to the ground and spiders fell from the ceiling. They landed on the furs, but they wouldn’t stay there. Instead of nets, what fell out were medium-sized balls – the size of basketballs, but metal. They made loud bangs as they hit the ground, and the impact triggered a mechanism. Wire shot out from the balls in every direction and each piece had a hook on the end that would stick into anything it came across. Plenty of them came across the bare ankles and calves of tribesmen. After a two second delay, the electrical charge surged through the wire and into the people they were attached to.
Because the mechanism was triggered by the landing of the ball on the floor, the battery hadn’t been drained in advance and the voltage was strong enough that people were brought to the ground in spasms. For people with weaker hearts or multiple hooks in them, death was almost immediate.
Mart had dodged the wires, whether intentionally or luckily, I couldn’t tell, and didn’t get electrocuted. He had to stand and watch as people fell around him. He drew back his lips over his teeth and truly looked like the savage he was. Normally he was the eloquent one, but right now he was more beast than man.
The members of the tribe that had survived and those who hadn’t been able to fit in the room in the first place gathered together in the now trap-free room. Mart spoke to most of them while others searched the people laying on the ground to see which were alive and which had succumbed.
“Fuck,” one of Cara’s men said, watching them check pulses. “They’re really dead?”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“That can’t be okay.”
“It’s them or us,” Cara barked. “No hesitation. You know that.”
But knowing it in theory was very different to watching it play out in front of you, and they were starting to realize that.
They spoke in such low tones that the microphone couldn’t pick up on the words passing through their lips, but it gave me a chance to count the remaining people and see how many had made it through.
Just twenty still lived to tell the tale, and there were still plenty of traps left for them to face.
The next room was the one I’d been looking forward to most. This was where I really showed them how stupid they were for thinking they could just take the same route through the facility without me having changed it.
Because I’d used the idea of the panel separation in the maze, I’d renovated this room completely. Aside from barring the door at the other side of the room that had previously led to the elevator, now I’d finally made use of the D-tier creatures I’d been steadily creating since the success of the first wolf. They’d been going on trips with Lisa and the girls to search for the tribe and Daisy, but aside from that final fight had seen barely any action.
More importantly, I had not seen them in action at all, even though I’d spent the past few weeks working tirelessly on ideas for how to make them as powerful as they could be without tipping them over the edge into C-tier where they would have too high autonomy for me to control.
The hardest part had been figuring out how to best utilize them in this room rather than just putting them in the middle and letting them run rampant as soon as the door was opened.
I’d liked the separation to attack people, but it narrowed the potential of the creatures too. When they’d killed their prey they were trapped too, unable to keep going and ravaging other people.
I still liked the idea of separating people though, so I’d spent forever thinking how I could make them as weak as possible without limiting the potential of the D-tier creatures I’d spent so much time on. The conclusion I’d come to had meant several days of bots renovating the room completely. I’d almost completely removed the floor of the already huge room to give myself some more depth, and that meant the room below was out of commission too.
With the floor knocked out I had a bunch of space to play with though, and I’d created my favorite room in the whole place.
From the doorway were three paths, just a single floor panel wide, that led across to what looked like three doors on the other side.
They were completely sealed shut, but by then people would be across and at the mercy of my beasts.
Below the walkways across, I’d had Surre create enough tangled, thorny vines that anyone who fell from the walkways would be snagged by them. There was no chance of them falling through to the room below, which was much less secure, because vines as wide as the pathways themselves were knitted together so tightly.
The same vines worked their way up the walls too, and hidden in them were the creatures that would stop the tribe getting to the other side.
It was perfect.
My girls seemed to agree, especially Marie, who was on the edge of her seat, craning forward and waiting for someone to make the move and step into the room. Watching her get excited to see it in action followed by the inability to watch it be successful without feeling bad for those who got hurt was a rollercoaster.
Even if I ever figured out how to get my girls back into gestation to make their bodies powerful, I would never play with their personalities again.
Mart was at the front of the queue of people peering around the door at what they thought was their final obstacle. The paths looked like a diamond: the shortest went straight across to the door, and two more extended out then came back to the door at a right angle. I didn’t know if they’d even bother trying to take the longer paths, but I hoped they did. Having more of them in the room would give them a better chance against the creatures, but it would
also make it more satisfying when they were slaughtered.
Mart tapped the panel in front of him with his sword and nothing happened. As amusing as it would be to have them all get nearly all the way across and then have the whole thing collapse, it was unrealistic. I had to bolster the floor panels with big metal girders so that they could take the weight of whoever was walking across them, and that meant no chance of having them disintegrate.
Mart turned and murmured to his tribe. He made some hand movements that I didn’t understand. Then he turned and started walking across the shortest path. I was pleased to see that the rest of the tribe followed close behind him. They took all three paths and tried to hurry across them before anything could attack.
I held off on the order to attack until Mart had reached the door he knew led to the elevator, and realized that he couldn’t open it. He pushed on the door first, then tried to get his sword into the crack I’d left there on purpose so he didn’t realize just how barricaded it was until he got there. Then he tried his powers, and I got a bigger sense of what exactly his superpower was. He beckoned for everyone to move backward and then launched an explosion at the door.
This one was much bigger, but more focused. The blast looked more like a laser than an uncontrolled explosion like the first time.
It did make a small hole in the door, but not enough to come anywhere close to piercing the stacks of pure steel that I’d lined up behind the original door.
As soon as he realized how long it was going to take him to blast his way through to the elevator, I called on my creatures to attack.
They emerged from their vine-covered hideouts in a flap of wings, bared teeth and razor sharp claws. The combination was perfect. I’d worked so hard on it and I knew it was the best I could make a D-tier creature without access to superpowers. The body was that of the cat, lithe and light but powerful. The claws and teeth came from the wolf, and the faces were long snouts with enhanced senses of smell. Even though that didn’t help much in their current situation, when they went out into the desert they were great trackers.
Most important were the wings, and the fire sacs.
The wings were the best I’d managed so far. Thanks to having access to the eagle blueprint, I had finally created something with the wingspan to properly carry larger bulks without requiring ridiculous sustenance to maintain. They were large enough to carry the creatures easily, but not so big that they crowded the room and ran into each other. The could hover and dive, catch themselves in mid-air to stop their attack.
And the fire sacs were my crowning achievement. It had taken a lot of messing around with the blueprints and help from Ego’s modelling capability to figure out how to add fire to something mammalian. I’d realized that was where my problem was: the mammal base. Outside I wanted attributes of mammals, but inside I didn’t have the same restrictions. Although you couldn’t see it without knowing what had gone into the creation, the majority of these creatures was actually reptilian. It meant the inside of the beasts could hold the fire sacs without the outside being corroded.
The amount of power these things had was insane, and Ego had confirmed that their stats far outstripped those of most of the tribe. Only Mart and two others had raw power that could beat these D-tier creatures.
They lunged for the men and women on the walkways with their mouths open. There were eight of them, four on either side, and all blew fire at the same time.
Screams echoed around the room from the people on the two outer paths as their skin was charred. Some people dived to avoid the fire and fell into the vines. They screamed too as the sharp thorns bit into their bodies, but the furs they wore managed to reduce any damage too serious.
Instead of going backward, more people rushed into the room to replace those who had fallen. One thing I had to give them credit for, they definitely weren’t cowards.
“Wow,” Cara said, sitting back and showing the first signs of being genuinely impressed by my efforts. “Those things are really powerful.”
After the first wave they were limited in their breathing fire ability for fear of catching either other with the heat. Their claws and teeth were no less dangerous. They entered battle with an intense mobility advantage that let them pick people off without exposing themselves much.
The people on the outer pathways suffered most, falling one after another either to horrible injuries as their guts or throats were ripped out, or to a concentrated blast of fire designed to obliterate only the person in front of them.
This was where the potential of the superpowers was really revealed. Mart was carrying them all with his explosions. Now he’d revealed that they could be targeted, I knew how dangerous he was. He waited until the beasts flew away after an attack, so they were hovering in the open air, and then unleashed an attack. He destroyed the wing of one, sending it careening down into the vines where its injury left it open to attack by the tribes people that had fallen down there still with their weapons. His second and third attacks missed, but on the fourth he took the head of a creature clean off.
His smile told me that it was revenge for the chief that had lost his life in the same way.
As powerful as Mart was, it wasn’t enough. If this kept up, he would be the only person left alive in no time.
Even Marie wasn’t looking away this time. She watched with fascinated horror as someone was decapitated by the talons of a beast. Their head rolled down into the people who had fallen into the vines, blood flowing from the body that followed it shortly after.
“This is too much,” the same guy who had complained before said.
“Do you want to fight him yourself?” Cara snapped. “It would be your head exploding if we got to that point.”
The guy shut up quickly.
The people fallen into the thorns but still uninjured had gotten so high that the birds turned their focus to them. One divebombed with an open mouth and roared a blast of fire that obliterated the person beneath it.
And the vines.
The hole in the vines was large enough that the charred remains of the man fell straight through and the clang as he landed on the metal floor beneath echoed in the room.
Mart’s head immediately turned to the noise and the lightbulb went off in his head.
“Shit,” I hissed, as he targeted his explosion toward an empty area of vines and blasted his way straight through.
My girls stood up immediately, and Cara obviously regretted having put the fear of God into her people at the thought of having to fight Mart, because he’d found a way through my trap that I hadn’t even considered.
He fell onto the vines and wrapped his hand around a loose one to make his way down to the room beneath the vines. The rest of his people followed, and when the creatures tried to follow suit, they were forced through the chokepoint of the hole in the vines, so Mart’s attacks hit them.
My final fight hadn’t just failed, it had let them bypass the many more rooms of traps I’d laboriously set up.
Now they were on the same level as we were, and still a dozen people strong.
We were going to have to take them on. My girls against them.
My heart was in my throat as I stared straight at Mart’s pleased face. This was exactly what he wanted.
But so did I.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It didn’t take Mart long to open the door in the room they’d all fallen into. He found the elevator and crammed the remaining tribespeople into it. They took it down a floor to sub-level two.
Mart was at the front, his arms – charred, but not so ruined that he didn’t have any attacks left in him – raised and ready to attack.
He obviously knew we intended to blast him as soon as he came out.
He met the first blast with a shield that he conjured from thin air, protecting him against Cara’s powerful attack, which we’d thought would kill at least some of the people in the elevator.
“Fuck,” Cara hissed loudly as they spilled from the elevat
or and into the room.
The fighting started, and they split into groups as they tried to best their opponents.
I had to just sit and watch for a moment. My girls took on their opponents completely without fear, no matter how much doubt they had shown about luring the tribe to the facility in the first place.
Marie was against two opponents, a man and a woman without powers, but armed with dangerous swords in each hand that gave them reach she couldn’t match with just her teeth and claws.
She overpowered them with her utility, going low and getting up close before they realized how quick she could scurry across the floor. She tore their unprotected calves to shreds, making them shout out. The rats she’d kept at a distance chose that moment to strike, going high and diving onto the chests and backs, digging claws and teeth into whichever soft skin they could find between the protective furs.
Elaine and her lizard worked as the perfect team, the chain around its thick neck giving Elaine the ability to pull herself out of bad situations with more agility than even her feline body would have given her on its own.
Her lizard’s fearless protection of her warded most people off, and she found herself one-on-one with whoever she chose to fight, claws ripping into flesh without hesitation.
Lisa was the most interesting to watch. Because of her position as leader of the dozen creatures they had fighting with them – except for the rats, which had no wolf DNA and listened only to Marie – she had to balance giving commands with being in the middle of the fight and her situational awareness made me envious. She could dive forward, dodge two attacks from people at the side of her, sink her daggers into the neck of the woman in front of her, and then bark out commands for two different creatures without missing a beat.
Cara and Mart were fun to watch, but their powers had them sequestered away in the corner of the fight where they weren’t going to damage anyone else with their explosions.